I want to avoid os-tree if I can, since that seems to defeat the purpose.

How so?

Great piece of information.

Thank you for your kind words 😊!

at least it (without any experience) feels like that I’ll spend more time setting it up and tinkering with it than actually recovering from a rare cases where things just break

That might be the case depending on your proficiency and to what degree the ‘immutable’ distro allows you to configure your distro declarative. On e.g. NixOS you can define (most of) your system declarative. As such, reinstalling your entire setup is done through some config files. You can even push this further with the (in)famous Impermanence module that has been popularized by the popular Erase your darlings blog-post, in which your system is wiped every time you shut off the machine and rebuild (basically from scratch) every time you boot into it.

Potentially I might had an option to move LVM partition on the disk to grow boot partition, but that would’ve required shrinking filesystem first (which isn’t trivial on a LVM PV)

I haven’t worked with LVM yet. Defaulting to Btrfs (as Fedora -amongst others- does) has so far provided me a reliable experience, even though I’m aware that I’m missing out on performance. Hopefully, Bcachefs will prove to be a vast improvement over Btrfs in a relatively short time-span. You’ve pointed out to have installed Linux Mint with ZFS. Would I be correct to assume that you’ve been hurt by Btrfs in its infancy and choose to not rely on it since? Or is it related to lacking proper support for RAID 5/6? Or perhaps something else? Please feel free to inform me as I don’t feel confident on this topic!

and the experience ubuntu has lately provided I just took the longer route and installed mint with zfs.

Understandable. Though, I can’t stop myself from being very interested in their upcoming Ubuntu Core Desktop. But I imagine you couldn’t care less 😜.

It’s often used to describe a distro in which (at least some) parts of the system are read-only on runtime. Furthermore, features like atomicity (i.e. an upgrade either happens or doesn’t; no in-between state), reproducibility^[1] and improved security against certain types of attacks are its associated benefits that can (mostly) only exist due to said ‘immutability’. This allows higher degree of stability and (finally) rollback-functionality, which are functionalities that are often associated with ‘immutability’ but aren’t inherently/necessarily tied to it; as other means to gain these do exist.

The reason why I’ve been careful with the term “immutable” (which literally is a fancy word for “unchanging”), is because the term doesn’t quite apply to what the distros offer (most of these aren’t actually unchanging in absolute sense) and because people tend to import associations that come from other ecosystems that have their own rules regarding immutability (like Android, SteamOS etc). A more fitting term would be atomic (which has been used to some degree by distros in the past). The name actually applies to all distros that are currently referred to as ‘immutable’, it’s descriptive and is the actual differentiator between these and the so-called ‘mutable’ distros. Further differentiation can be had with descriptions like declarative, image-based, reproducible etc.

1. That is, two machines that have the exact same software installed should be identical even if one has been installed a few years ago, while the other has been freshly installed (besides content of home folder etc). So stuff like cruft, bitrot and (to a lesser degree) state are absent on so-called ‘immutable’ distros.

I personally agree with your assessments regarding Debian Sid and Manjaro. However, I didn’t want to force my (potential) ‘bias’ in a comment that tries to be otherwise neutral. Thank you for bringing up the ‘asterisks’ associated with both of these!

NixOS has been around since 2003, thus making it older than Ubuntu (2004). Even Silverblue has been out since more than 5 years (October 2018). Finally, we can’t forget about Guix that had its first release over 10 years ago (January 2013).

In general, consider setting up any kind of rollback functionality; this will enable you to get right back to action without any downtime when you’re time-restricted. This can be achieved by configuring your system with (GRUB-)Btrfs+TImeshift/Snapper. Please bear in mind that it’s likely that you have to come back to solve it eventually, though*. (Perhaps it’s worth thinking about what can be done to ensure that you don’t end up with a broken system in the first place. *cough* _{‘immutable’ distro} *cough*)

If this seems too troublesome to setup, then consider using distros that have this properly setup from the get-go by default; like (in alphabetical order) Garuda Linux, Manjaro, Nobara, openSUSE Aeon/Kalpa/Leap/Slowroll/Tumbleweed, siduction and SpiralLinux. Furthermore, so-called ‘immutable’ distros also have rollback functionality while not relying on aforementioned (GRUB-)Btrfs+TImeshift/Snapper; this applies to e.g. blendOS, Fedora Kinoite/Sericea/Silverblue, Guix, NixOS and Vanilla OS.

If you feel absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of choice, then you should probably consider the bold ones; not because I think they’re necessarily better but:

• openSUSE’s offerings are generally speaking very polished, therefore being highly suitable to replace Linux Mint or Ubuntu. It’s its own thing though, therefore you might not be able to access packages that are exclusively found in Debian’s/Ubuntu’s repos (though Distrobox solves that trivially). Tumbleweed if you like rolling release, Slowroll if you prefer updates only once every 1-2 months and finally Leap if you lean more towards Stable/LTS releases.
• siduction for being based on Debian; but it’s strictly on the Unstable(/Sid) branch.
• SpiralLinux for being based on Debian; this one -however- has proper support for switching branches.
• Vanilla OS for being based on Debian; this one is very ambitious. But, because it’s an ‘immutable’ distro, it might require the biggest changes to your workflow.

nvidia drivers are absent

While any of the aforementioned distros do a decent job at ‘supporting’ Nvidia, perhaps you might be best off with uBlue’s Nvidia images. As these are images relying on the same technology that Fedora’s immutable distros do, rollback functionality and all the other good stuff we’ve come to love -like automatic upgrades in the background- are present as well. In case you’re interested to know how these actually provide improved Nvidia support:

"We’ve slipstreamed the Nvidia drivers right onto the operating system image. Steps that once took place on your local laptop are now done in a continuous integration system in GitHub. Once they are complete, the system stamps out an image which then makes its way to your PC.

No more building drivers on your laptop, dealing with signing, akmods, third party repo conflicts, or any of that. We’ve fully automated it so that if there’s an issue, we fix it in GitHub, for everyone.

But it’s not just installation and configuration: We provide Nvidia driver versions 525, 520, and 470 for each of these. You can atomically switch between any of these, so if your driver worked perfectly on a certain day and you find a regression you just rebase to that image.

Or switch to another desktop entirely.

No other desktop Linux does this, and we’re just getting started."

Source

Welcome on board!

You revealed in your previous post to be a gamer. Therefore, I’d like to focus on software that might help with that (in alpabetical order):

• Bazzite-Arch
• Bottles
• Conty
• Lutris^[1]

For a one-stop-solution for all your problems related to package X not being available in the repos of distro Y; consider the more than excellent Distrobox.

1. You should probably start with this one as the others might be less intuitive to you at the moment. Furthermore, their use-cases and thus why one might prefer the others over Lutris in the first place might not be clear currently and not even be stuff you worry about in the first place.

we use discord

Fortunately, Discord has (very recently) started to officially support Linux as a flatpak.

I somehow forgot that Fedora also had Firefox in their flatpak repos.

I got a Nitrokey for Heads

You know what’s good, fam.

but for some reason it never arrived

That’s messed up, though.

I did debian with cinnamon and ran into some issues

This might be important; perhaps consider telling us about the issues you ran into.

I am an absolute beginner to linux

Honestly, you should be fine regardless. But it’s undeniable that -due to Linux Mint’s popularity amongst new users- you’ll likely have an easier time finding solutions to problems you might encounter.

and i’m a g*mer (laugh it up)

Once again, either one of these should be able to suit your needs. You might have to relearn how you access your games, but that’s true regardless of whichever distro you end up choosing.

Apart from having all the nice KDE integration

I’m a sucker for GNOME :P , but I’ll keep it in mind.

things like Keepass integration

The flatpak does allow integration, but isn’t built-in unfortunately; so one has to fiddle a bit themselves to set it up.

Fido2 keys

I should rely more on those. Do you have any recommendations? I’ve been hearing good things about Nitropad and Yubico, but I honestly don’t know if they’re actually good and how they would fare amongst eachother.

drag and drop

Overrated anyways /s :P .

Also afaik the Fedora Firefox has a good SELinux profile

It’s probably better configured with the native package than the flatpak one indeed. I wonder if this will change as Fedora is interested to ship Firefox as a flatpak by default on Silverblue (and variants).

it runs damn fast. I did a speed test and it was best

I haven’t had the best internet speeds since I’ve been relying on free VPN. But that’s on me :P .

Additionally, ensure that flatpaks are installed within that home partition. Some distros (like Fedora) default to installing flatpaks system-wide (and thus flatpaks end up being installed in /var instead). So, after ensuring that your home folder is correctly found within the home partition, just install flatpaks with the flatpak install --user *package-name* command.

as from Firefox RPM for example I can open any file and save anywhere. But its process isolation right?

For Firefox, the verdict on its native sandbox vs Flatpak’s native sandbox doesn’t seem conclusive. With -assumingly- knowledgeable peeps on both sides of the argument, which indeed does raise the question how knowledgeable they actually are. Nonetheless, for myself, I’ve accepted Flatpak’s sandbox to not be inferior to Firefox’ native one. Thus, I don’t see any problem with using its flatpak.

Damn good find! Not expensive, about double the price I paid but still very reasonable.

Oh lol, that’s a considerable difference. Though I suppose the Intel CPUs on your device probably aren’t 12th gen?

they have a Tux bootsplash logo in their Bios??

Who offers that :P ? Did I somehow miss that?

And the BIOS really is great, I will miss that on Coreboot I guess. But all the necessary features should be there.

coreboot FTW!

Thanks for taking the time to take a proper look at the link!

I linked the source but sure, I’ll link it more for you.

I am aware, but the same source seemingly contradicted your point^[1] regarding sub-sandboxing.

Wow, thanks a lot for the work you’ve put into this! It might take some time for me to go through this, but I’ll definitely take a look and perhaps I’ll return on this at a later point. Perhaps with this I will finally be able to install my Chromium-based browsers as a flatpak and don’t feel bad about it.

Once again, your engagement has been much appreciated! So please feel free to let me know if I can buy you a coffee or something 😊! Unfortunately, statements like “Thank you so much!” don’t quite capture the sheer magnitude of gratitude I feel towards you right now. For whatever it’s worth; I salute you, good human.

1. “It lets Chromium use flatpak sub-sandboxes” that you expressed in this comment.

No the NV41MZ for example has no numpad.

That’s unfortunate.

but it was the only clevo on like all Europes Ebay. Literally shipped it in from Great Britain

Honestly, I haven’t done a lot of business on Ebay. So, I don’t know a lot on how much cheaper you might get devices from there. Though, I wonder if it’s a lot cheaper than say this device.

Thanks, true!

😉

The people from Novacustom are very nice.

Agreed. They definitely are.

Unfortunately, you didn’t -to my knowledge- support nor retract your claim on Chromium using flatpak sub-sandboxes. Therefore, I find it hard to continue taking your words at face value.

I have enjoyed these interactions, so don’t get me wrong; but if I (possibly) catch you on spreading misinformation (even if unintentional), then I find it hard to keep engagement up as there’s no guarantee that anything else coming from you is actually correct.

I would love to be corrected on this though, so please feel free if I have misunderstood you or anything else that would revive this conversation. If not, then I would still like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for this friendly interaction we’ve had. Take care!

spare parts

It seems NovaCustoms offer some spareparts. I wonder if the ones not explicitly stating NV4xMZ can be used on your device as well.